Locality-Aware Predictive Scheduling of Network Processors

Title: Locality-Aware Predictive Scheduling of Network Processors

Authors: Tilman Wolf and Mark A. Franklin

Abstract: Demands for flexible processing have moved general purpose processing into the data path of networks. Processor schedulers have a great impact on the performance of these real-time systems. We present measurements that show that the workload of a network processor is highly regular and predictable. Processing time predictions, based on these measurements, can be used in scheduling together with information about locality in the instruction stream to significantly improve throughput performance. We propose two scheduling schemes, Locality-Aware and Locality-Aware Predictive, that try to avoid cold caches when scheduling packets for processors. Simulations of the schedulers using packet processing times obtained from an operational network processor show the tradeoffs between the algorithms and their performance improvements over First-Come-First- Serve scheduling.

Published: Tilman Wolf and Mark A. Franklin, "Locality-aware predictive scheduling for network processors," in Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), Tucson, AZ, Nov. 2001, pp. 152-159.

Download: PDF

BibTeX:
@inproceedings{Wolf:LAP01,
   author    = {Wolf, Tilman and Franklin, Mark A.},
   title     = {Locality-Aware Predictive Scheduling for Network Processors},
   booktitle = {Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)},
   year      = 2001,
   month     = nov,
   address   = {Tucson, AZ},
   pages     = {152--159}
}

Copyright: © 2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.